


like the stars in the sky, separated by millions of leagues

by AureliaAstralis



Series: a sky full of stars, what a heavenly view [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Constellations, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, M/M, Minor Character Death, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 02:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3102623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AureliaAstralis/pseuds/AureliaAstralis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red hair drew his gaze each time the memory passed, and those green eyes stared back at him inscrutably even as he faded back into reality.</p><p>Other things – the silky stoke of feathers, dark skin and dark eyes, and the kiss of wind against her face as she lingered in the air weightlessly – were like true dreams; ones that made the offset triangles sprawled across her shoulders tingle with apprehension and anticipation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like the stars in the sky, separated by millions of leagues

**Author's Note:**

> What happens when you take the soulmate trope, add a semester of Intro to Astronomy and a childhood love for mythology?
> 
> Fair warning to everyone: my head canons about this involve a sort of gender fluidity, in the sense that the genders of past lives don't necessarily have to match the current genders of the Marvel characters I'm writing about.

As a child, Sam had gotten into all manner of accidents – broken arms and legs, fractured wrists and ankles, shattered collarbones – from what his grandmother called an unhealthy obsession with heights. He climbed anything he could; trees and playground sets evolved into houses and buildings, and it wasn’t long before even that wasn’t high enough. His first time in an airplane was at the age of thirteen, when his eighth grade class went on a weeklong field trip to Washington, D.C., and from then on he was lost to the sky.

The dreams started shortly after. Though his high school years, he became accustomed to waking up disoriented: dizzy with what he later realized was vertigo following the sensation of free-fall. He dreamt of a blazing brazier throwing light across carved marble columns, and the hot sun lying across his forehead in what felt like approval. He saw white linen against gold-tanned skin, lighter than what he had now, and remembered looking out upon a city from the plateau-top of a rocky outcrop as the sun set before his eyes.

And on rare occasions, the visions were brought to him in unfamiliar flashes: of a battle between a man and a monster, clashing amongst the salty spray of the ocean against seaside cliffs; of the same man surrounded by other men and women in endless space. Red hair drew Sam’s gaze each time the memory passed, and those green eyes stared back at him inscrutably even as he faded back into reality.

And the man, whoever he was, _was_ important – important like the span of lines and dots along the side of his ribcage. The marks, easy to overlook in most circumstances, seemed more like random moles and freckles in his youth, but he knew better once the visions started. The way they seemed to throb with warmth at his touch, or the way they stood out starkly despite the darkness of his skin, promised him something more – something he couldn’t place just yet.

The memories – because that’s what they were, he was sure of it – changed when he joined the Air Force, tunnel visioning into by far his favorite dreams of all: the pure, unadulterated feeling of flying, with nothing but his own body. It was everything he’d looked for as a child, adrenaline and wind burning his cheeks cold and red, and he always woke up wishing he could leap from the cockpit of a fighter jet and soar through the air like a bird.

In retrospect, it was Riley who helped Sam figured things out, who had stared at Sam with an uncanny glint in his eyes the first time they’d met and grew to become his best friend. The man was eccentric, reading mythology books in his bunk and going bird-watching during his days off, and he wore the tattoos of an eagle and a vulture on either forearm like badges of honor. When Sam had finally gotten around to asking about them, Riley had just smiled softly.

_“Phene loved her husband enough to follow him into the sky, even when he fell for another,”_  he had said, bright-eyed and sad.  _“Some people can’t choose who they love.”_

For a long time, Sam hadn’t understood, even as they were selected as participants in an experimental two-man pararescue team.  _EXO-7_  was Sam’s dreams brought to life, the closest he could get to the feeling of air billowing under his outstretched wings and tucking his body into a streamlined nosedive. Being up in the sky, just him and Riley, brought him a measure of inexplicable joy that seemed permanently etched on his features. It was the happiest he’d ever been, and Riley’s unending smile seemed to say the same thing.

The only thing that bothered Sam was his given codename  _Falcon –_ it didn’t feel right, not the way Riley’s  _Vulture_  did.

And then months later, when he scrambled desperately against the sandstorm to fall beside his best friend’s broken body in the Afghanistan desert, Riley smiled up at him with bloody teeth as he whispered the words that Sam could never forget.

_“Find your happiness, Periphas.”_ There was a flash of expression crossing his face, one that Sam could only describe as love, before the life fled from his eyes.

It took a long time for him to come to terms with Riley’s death. He left the Air Force, moving back to the States to work at a VA clinic in central D.C., renting out a cheap basement studio apartment he found on Craigslist in nearby Bethesda. It took months before he was able to look at the box sitting in the back of his closet, filled with things Riley had left to him, and upon opening it there was a note tucked in the pages of that dog-eared mythology book.

_Periphas,_   
_We might not be husband and wife in this life, but you’re still my best friend._   
_I hope you find your Perseus._   
_All my love, Phene_

Sam looked at the open pages of the book in his lap, at the black-white image of a sculpted man holding a severed head, and felt the air leave his lungs.

Six months later, he met Steve Rogers at the National Mall. When he saw the same red hair and green eyes that he had dreamt about for years, he beamed at the beautiful woman smiling back at him through the frame of the car window.

_I found you.  
_

* * *

Natasha didn’t remember much of her life before the Red Room besides snippets of her childhood and fragments of dreams. There were fleeting memories – a woman’s smile and the warmth of strong arms around her waist – that paled in comparison to the vividness of a life that played out only in her sleep. She saw a childhood through the eyes of a boy, born and raised in a wooden chest floating in the middle of endless water, and had naively thought that she was safe from that prison-like fate.

After her parents sold her to Mother Russia for duty and country, she was injected with a brew of chemicals and drugs that burned away the color and sensations, stripping her dreams until all that remained were the nightmares and night terrors.

She suffered in silence, jerking awake with soundless gasps and tear-stained cheeks, as the soothing memories of rocking ocean waves and crooning lullabies washed into giant sea monsters with sword-sharp teeth and snake-haired women with eyes that turned men into stone. What little else that managed to filter through – hazy and cloudy, as if she was seeing through windows frosted over in the Siberian winters – was limited to blurry pinpricks of light and the soft sensation of warm and cold.

The pleasant feelings nudged against her skin, pushing and pricking under her skin like the needles the handlers wielded, and she didn’t dare speak of her dream-world escape.  She made the mistake once, words spilling out to her mentor during a night of sex after an ops mission gone awry, and in stilted words he had whispered of his own visions: marble thrones and solid clouds and golden light.  _“Ostorozhnyy, Natashenka,”_  he had whispered into her ear, metal fingers tracing the dark lines and dots that draped across the skin of her upper back like delicate chains of jewels.  _“Do not forget that daydreams are not the same as freedom.”_

She had woken the next morning in the Red Room laboratory, strapped to a chair and pumped with a Molotov cocktail of serums as her mentor was wheeled out of the room, already frozen in his cryostasis chamber.

When she fought her way out of the Red Room, it was like reliving a past only her body could recall. Natasha had ducked and dodged, using an iron pipe like a sword and a metal surgeon’s tray as a shield as if in a choreographed fight that only she could remember, feet falling into familiar steps and her arms twisting and blocking as if she’d practiced the moves hundreds of times before. And at the same time, as her the rest of her body fell into attack patterns and positions that she’d never seen, the faces she fought flickered back and forth between Red Room doctors and the monsters that plagued her dreams.

Inhaling her first real breath of freedom felt like emerging from that floating chest in her visions, blinded by sunlight that only existed as slivers of gold between wood slats. Between evading Red Room agents sent after her and performing commissions to support herself, she spent her nights fighting through a whirlwind of kaleidoscope memories, abstract fragments that tried to flood her brain all at once as her body fought off the effects of the chemicals that worked to suppress her dreams.

What had been nightmares quickly became memories of triumph and victory, the visions coming back stronger than ever. She remembered beheading the snake-haired woman and freeing her mother, killing the sea serpent and claiming a princess as a bride. She remembered living a full and happy life, ruling as a just king and growing old with a wife. She remembered dying in peace, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and waking up in the night sky amongst others with stars adorning their brows.

Natasha knew who she was, or who she used to be. It took a serendipitous job to Florence, tracking a mark through the tourist-filled piazzas of the city, for her to stumble upon a bronze statue of a young boy holding up a head crowned with snakes and serpents, and she stared down at the name –  _Perseus_  – that was once hers, long ago.

Finding her past history through research was by far simpler than trying to decipher what her dream-memories tried telling her. Some things, like the feel of her fingers curled around a celestial bronze hilt, warm and sticky from sweat, or the weight of an iron-forged crown woven with laurels of pounded gold, made sense; the sensations comforting in remembrance of a life well lived compared to the disaster that was the one she had now. Other things – the silky stoke of feathers, dark skin and dark eyes, and the kiss of wind against her face as she lingered in the air weightlessly – were like true dreams; ones that made the offset triangles sprawled across her shoulders tingle with apprehension and anticipation.

There was only one time, when she felt like the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. When she saw him, teeth a stark white against the dark chocolate of his skin and a warm gaze that wrapped around her, she let her mask slip into a smile, and something in her lightened when he gave her one in return.

It wasn’t until she opened that file on Sam Wilson’s kitchen table as he stood before her, arms folded in a show of stubbornness, that she realized  _who_  he was, and who he could be. She frowned at the  _EXO-7: Falcon_ label stamped across the top the file, and she was surprised when she couldn’t help the words that seemed to fall from her mouth.

 _“Why not 'Eagle'?”_ She looked up in time to see the shock in his face change into something more hopeful. _  
_

 _"It would've been, if it wasn't taken by the President."_ He smiled, pulling up his shirt to show her the network of marks that trailed up the side of his torso. Blindly, she reached out as if mesmerized, and jerked back when the dots and lines exploded into a dusting of shimmering gold.

His lips widened into a grin, and even though Steve kept looking between the two of them in wild confusion, Natasha couldn’t help but return it.

_“Hello, Perseus.”  
_

* * *

**“They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and like the stars in the sky, separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.”**

_– Victor Hugo, Les Miserables_

**Author's Note:**

>  **Aquila** is a constellation in the northern sky; it was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy and remains one of the 88 modern constellations. Its name is Latin for 'eagle' and it represents the bird who carried Zeus/Jupiter's thunderbolts in Greco-Roman mythology. In Greek mythology, Aquila was identified with Periphas, a legendary king of Attica (later renamed Athens) who Zeus turned into Aetos Dios, the eagle that carried the thunderbolts of Zeus. 
> 
> **Perseus** is a constellation in the northern sky. Named after the Greek mythological hero Perseus, it was one of 48 listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy and is among the 88 modern constellations. In Greek mythology, Perseus was sent to kill Medusa the Gorgon, whose visage caused all who gazed upon her to turn to stone. Perseus slew Medusa and continued to the realm of Cepheus, rescuing the princess Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus by turning it to stone with Medusa's head. Perseus was one of the few Greek heroes to not meet a tragic end.


End file.
